Environmental Planning Using Augmented Reality

Abstract

Before a large project is carried out, it is difficult to know the resulting view of the project accurately and realistically. Even though you invite specialists to look up blue prints or data, the results obtained cannot be perceived directly through this sense. Moreover, a large project affects environments greatly, it is necessary to develop a new powerful visualization-tool that assesses environmental impact accurately from the esthetics and ecology points of view before engineering is constructed. Clearly, this is of great importance for avoidance of negative effects on environment. In recent years, the virtual reality (VR) has been rather popular for project planning. It provides us with a new means for visual assessment. As known, virtual reality needs to use three-dimensional (3D) computer graphics to model and render virtual environments in real-time. This approach usually requires laborious modeling and expensive 3D graphic accelerator for fast rendering of more complicated scenes. The rendering quality and scene complexity are often limited because of the real-time constraint. Consequently, it is difficult to obtain a satisfactory solution. However, augmented reality [1, 2] method can overcome the above limitations. Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that incorporates the rich information available in the real world into the virtual reality. The AR can be realized by overlaying 3D graphical objects with image without camera parameters pre-calibrated. Because of being a video-image approach, fewer virtual objects that will be fused into real environment need to be drawn, and so the cost of rendering is independent of the scene complexity. As a result, the AR system does not require specialized graphics accelerators. On the other hand, the amount of realism in the AR system depends on the quality of the input images. It is easy to make the AR systems more realistic than many VR systems. In the following, the main idea of the AR based on vision for environmental planning is presented.